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Laura Huxley recalls her meeting with Jiddu Krishnamurti at the home of yoga teacher, Vanda Scaravelli:

At Signora S.’s the food was natural, alive, and varied. Aldous and I praised it and were told that the order and combination of the courses had been made according to the famous Dr. Bircher-Benner of a nearby clinic in Zurich. From recipes for food, we went on to speak of my “Recipes for Living and Loving.” I had been very active in psychotherapy that year and had almost finished my book. Aldous spoke about the origin of the word ”recipes”— it is the imperative of the Latin word recipere, to receive— and told our hosts how my recipes had succeeded with some people for whom the orthodox methods had failed. Krishnamurti asked a few questions and listened intently. We spoke about vitamins and imagination, solitary confinement, LSD, alcoholism, and the congress on extrasensory perception that Aldous had recently attended in the South of France.

After lunch Signora S. tactfully suggested that I might want to speak alone with Krishnamurti. She and Aldous went into the living room. A large French window opened onto the terrace, where Krishnamurti and I were left alone. The French window was closed, but, as I realized later, Aldous could see us silhouetted against the sweeping view of the Alps. An hour or two later, when we left our hosts, Aldous could not wait to ask, “What in the world happened between you and Krishnaji? You two were gesticulating with such animation and excitement— it almost looked as though you were having a fight. What happened?”

The silent pantomime Aldous had seen through the French window must have been descriptive of our conversation— an extraordinary conversation against an extraordinary panorama. Krishnamurti and I had stood, walked, and sat on the terrace of the Swiss chalet, enveloped by high peaked mountains and pine woods of all gradations of green, light exhilarating green, and the deeper green of the vast mountain pastures. Brightness again, in luminous sky and in shining flowers, in sensuous undulating valleys, in Krishnamurti. Brightness everywhere.

The first thing I asked Krishnamurti, continuing our table conversation about psychotherapy, was how he dealt with the problem of alcoholism. He said nonchalantly that it had happened quite often that people, after one or two interviews with him, stopped drinking. When I asked how this came about, he said he did not know. He dismissed the subject and asked me whether LSD, mescaline, and the psychedelic substances in general were really of any benefit or just gave a temporary illusion. I told him of the medical research done in Canada in the field of alcoholism — of unexpected and successful results reported by Canadian doctors with a number of hopeless alcoholics who stopped drinking after only one or two administrations of LSD, and without further therapy. Krishnamurti seemed surprised.

He was silent for a few moments. There was something that he was going to say; also I had the feeling that his inner intensity was too powerful for the medium of words. I had no idea what was coming, but I knew something was about to happen.Silently he was holding my eyes with his dark burning look. Then with an extremely tense voice, he exploded, “You know, I think that those people who go about helping other people .. .” He stopped— then, with an even more piercing gaze, he spat out the next words like bullets of contempt: “those people … they are a curse!”

After the conversation at the table I had no doubt that “those people” included me.The accusation and the fire with which he flung it at me were for an instant paralyzing. Then, almost without thinking, I asked, “What about you? What do you think you are doing? You go about helping other people.”

As though he had never thought of himself as belonging to that cursed category,Krishnamurti was taken aback for a moment, totally surprised and perplexed. Then,with disarming simplicity and directness, he said, “But I don’t do it on purpose!”

It was the most extraordinary of statements. Aldous was enormously impressed by it, and also very touched and amused. Of course he understood it. But I must have looked bewildered, for Krishnamurti, in a softer, calmer way, said, “It just happens,do you see?” Alas, I did not see very well. Krishnamurti continued, “I am not a healer, or a psychologist, or therapist, or any of those things.” The words “healer,” “psychologist,” “therapist” burst from him like projectiles ejected by compressed power. “I am only a religious man. Alcoholics or neurotics or addicts— it doesn’t matter what the trouble is— they get better quite often— but that is not important; that is not the point— it is only a consequence.”

“What is wrong with such a consequence?” I asked. “I only give people techniquesor recipes or tools to help them to do what they need to do— what is wrong in usingthe transformation of energy to change those miserable feelings into constructive behavior?” That had been what we had discussed at lunch. I knew that Krishnamurtiwas violently opposed to dogmas, rites, gurus, and Ascended Masters— to all thegadgetry of those organized powers whose aim is to impress the masses withkeeping the godhead and its graces as their supreme and private monopoly. But I hadno idea that he also objected to psycho-physical exercises, such as my recipes. Unaware of this fact, I had innocently exposed myself and my work. Now I realized that he had restrained himself during lunch, tactfully waiting until we were alone. He did not restrain himself now; vehemently, with unspeakable intensity, he spoke.

“No! No! Techniques— transformation— no— rubbish! One must destroy— destroy… everything!” Fleetingly a thought crossed my mind: how easily such a man can be misunderstood, misinterpreted! I wanted to understand— I knew that he wanted me to understand, but how to ask— that was the question. “But what do you do?” I repeated.

And he repeated: “Nothing— I am only a religious man.”

It had the sound of a final statement, a baffling one to me. Six words, I thought, but hundreds of different meanings, according to each person’s conditioning. Perhaps he was simply restating what Christ had said:

But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.

But I was not thinking about Christ— I wanted to know what Krishnamurti meant by “a religious man.”

“What is a religious man?”

Krishnamurti changed his tone and rhythm. He spoke now calmly, with incisiveness.”I will tell you what a religious man is. First of all, a religious man is a man who is alone— not lonely, you understand, but alone— with no theories or dogmas, no opinion, no background. He is alone and loves it— free of conditioning and alone— and enjoying it. Second, a religious man must be both man and woman— I don’t mean sexually— but he must know the dual nature of everything; a religious man must feel and be both masculine and feminine. Third,” and now his manner intensified again, “to be a religious man, one must destroy everything— destroy the past, destroy one’s convictions, interpretations, deceptions— destroy all self-hypnosis— destroy until there is no center; you understand, no center. ” He stopped.

No center?

After a silence Krishnamurti said quietly, “Then you are a religious person. Then stillness comes. Completely still.”

In 2012 I began to have inner visions of the Torus. I did not have the word Torus in memory at that time, I only had my inner vision and I was holding onto that tiger-tail for many days, even sketching out the Torus, not knowing the word. In 2014 I found visual examples of the Torus on the web and it reinforced the insight. My inner-vision of the Torus was not a static photograph, but a living multi-dimensional animation. Something was happening on the inside that had it’s origin beyond “the me.” Encountering the Torus was among the greatest synchronicities I have ever come across, and synchronicity has now become a constant feature of my everyday reality. Synchronicity is not all roses and sunshine, but encountering the Torus was a pain-free experience, unlike some other synchronicity that I need not mention.

“Oh you hurt my feelings” or “I don’t know what to do” or show any weakness at all.

Teachers will say, “just tell the bully how it makes you feel.”

This is naive and insane. Don’t ever let a bully know there is a weak spot, that you got hurt. Because it’s like a heat seeking missile. They are moved to exploit that vulnerability. It’s a chance to assert their dominance. (Gordon Neufield)

^ that is why I like stoicism. The ways that humans assert their dominance in a heirarchy require a mind that is clear and free of anger, and stoicism can help you get to that state of mind where you don’t react with arguments, fighting and revenge. Stoicism makes a distinction between justice and revenge, as it is not easy to see the difference.

The primitive form of abuse is physical. The sophisticated form of abuse is the continual undermining of the child’s courage across, perhaps, their entire life. There’s a terribly monstrous aspect to that. If you’re not respected by the child, you will absolutely take revenge on them.

Judge Hans Beiter from Harvard, not doing so well with his career, why? Because his axioms supplant his overweening ambition and fatal hypocrisy. You’re a stage actor using your scholarship to perform state funded surveillance cloaked as “a baseline for human health”. As long as your ambition is overweening, you will continue to depress and bore the piss out of anyone unfortunate enough to respect your miserable scholarship. Hans, your amygdala is hyper-vigilant, but you think the differentiation in cannabis users’ amygdala makes them “bad” and you “good” because your ambition is overweening and tiresome

Does one understand respect? Be less curious about people’s private life, and be more curious about ideas. What I did 10 minutes ago, or what I did 2 years ago, or 10 years ago, why does one care to know such worthless things? These same invasive people will also be the ones who have lots of suggestions for what you “should” be doing in the future, and they will have critical and negative things to say about what you should not be doing now. Why can’t you live your own life instead of trying to hijack someone elses interests?

“If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy.

This may seem surprising, for we [may] think of the latter as a form of science, somewhat practical and materialistic in attitude, and the former as extremely esoteric religions concerned with areas of the spirit almost entirely out of this world.

This is because the combination of our unfamiliarity with Eastern cultures and their sophistication gives them an aura of mystery into which we project fantasies of our own making.

Yet the basic aim of these ways of life is something of quite astonishing simplicity, beside which all the complications of reincarnation and psychic powers, of superhuman mahatmas, and of schools of occult technology, are a smoke screen in which the credulous inquirer can lose himself indefinitely.

The main resemblance between the Eastern way of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our ways of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the natural world.

The psychotherapist has, for the most part, been interested in changing the consciousness of peculiarly disturbed individuals. The disciplines of Buddhism and Taoism are, however, concerned with changing the consciousness of normal, socially adjusted people.

But it is increasingly apparent to psychotherapists that the normal state of consciousness in our culture is both the context and the breeding ground of mental disease. A complex of societies of vast material wealth bent on mutual destruction is anything but a condition of social health.”